Who is John Galt?

Before I started this blog, I wanted to check if there was a potential for finding enough content. Learning from a mistake I had made in the past – The phrase ‘if you build it, they will come’ was something I had once taken too literally, and had suffered the consequences.

This time, I decided to let one of Steve Jobs’ phrases guide my actions – ‘most people don’t pick up the phone and call anymore’. I decided to do just that.

Back to the story – Either I had reached out to the nicest bunch of entrepreneurs in my contact list, or the entrepreneur community is generally very supportive of its own kind – but I got more favourable responses than expected. One of the first interviews was with Mr. Nitin Saxena of ALBJ Ventures.

What I had read about his venture was very intriguing – an app called Speedsz that could allow compression of data transferred between devices up to 70%. This sounded too good to be true, and almost like the base concept of the series ‘Silicon Valley’. What was more inspiring was how the entrepreneurial journey of Mr. Saxena had begun.

While working as a Consultant at a company in the IT & Telecom industry, Mr. Saxena had devised the initial idea for such an algorithm which would allow for data compression. He presented this concept to the seniors in his company at a business venture competition inside his company. To no surprise, the company found the idea viable enough to invest their energy and manpower in the same. They deployed a team of people along with Mr. Saxena to create a functioning model they could use.

Things were going well and only seemed to look positive, until one day the company decided to pull the plug on the project, proclaiming that it could not be done.

Very taken aback, Mr. Saxena decided to leave this company. The feeling one gets when you see a dream taking shape – only to see it slipping through your fingers right after. To make matters worse, a senior from the company had even called him and said that he could do nothing without the resources his company had.

Mr. Nitin decided that this was merely a setback, and was far from finished. Over the next few years, he set up ALBJ Ventures with colleagues Mr. Parthasarathy Ramanujam and Mr. Hemant Kumar. They even found out that ‘Onavo’ a data-compression software company based in Israel had been bought over by Facebook. This only went to show that what they were trying to achieve was very possible and had been done.

They eventually did create it and the software worked as promised. To go to market, they wished to enter the B2B domain first to establish a strong foothold in an environment that gave them better control. They approached various organisations who rely heavily on data transmission and stand to benefit from such a service. In a country where network speeds have a lot of scope to increase, Speedsz had allowed these organisations to work around the network problem and significantly cut down on their internet usage costs. Their clients had seen results in just 2 weeks from initiation.

Speedsz App Dashboard

ALBJ Ventures was also able to raise funding of an undisclosed amount from the Rajasthan Angel Investor Network (RAIN).

Over a span of 6 years, the roller-coaster of a journey it was for Mr. Saxena, but now ALBJ ventures is ready to change the face of data-compression for large organisations, and if my persuasion was any good, they may even look at entering the B2C market.

As if I wasn’t amazed enough with this story, Mr. Saxena told me what next is lined up next for his company.

ALBJ Power is another venture which they are working on where they have created a prototype of a generator which creates electricity from Atmospheric Temperature. The first time I heard this, I almost didn’t believe it, but when Mr. Saxena explained it to me, it still sounded too good to be true, but a little more believable.

This type of generator could be placed in a variety of locations and potentially solve the problem of power for a fraction of the cost of conventional methods that often need specific environmental conditions to be installed.

ALBJ Power Genset

If you were wondering why the title of this article was about John Galt, then this was the reason. Mr. Saxena may not hold the same beliefs as the character, however he has certainly proved that with the right frame of mind, science fiction can often change to fact.

I wish the very best for Mr. Saxena and hope that his ideas and ventures can lead to significant progress to our country and the world. Would also like to thank him for what I feel is the best possible 1st story for Founder Origin!